Wayfinding is an increasingly important technology and refers to pedestrian and vehicle driver navigating and destination finding in relatively large and complex indoor or semi-indoor facilities such as hospitals, government buildings, libraries, shopping malls, theme or amusement parks, city cores, historical sites, tourist attractions, parking structures, and the like. Conventional wayfinding typically involves signage-based approaches, wherein passive elements such as signs, lights, color-coding, and the like are deployed to guide a visitor through a facility. More recent wayfinding approaches involve satellite-enabled global positioning systems (GPS).
In particular, wayfinding technology may be deployed in hospitals because growing data indicates that an overwhelming percentage of hospital visitors, including visitors, patients, and even staff, have difficulty finding their way around a hospital. This is particularly true when a large hospital has undergone numerous expansions and renovations over time, sometimes resulting in different wings having floors that do not vertically align, corridors that join at confusing angles, and functionally related destinations that are distant from one another. Complicating matters, hospitals often have little to poor signage with confusing wording and sometimes outdated instructions. Worse yet, wayfinding in hospitals is particularly difficult for the elderly, people with impaired vision, those with reading disabilities, and ethnic minorities with limited English language skills.
Moreover, current wayfinding approaches do not adequately address security restrictions, emergency routing, pedestrian traffic load, and return routing. In public facilities, like hospitals, it is nearly impossible to rely on signage to control access to sensitive areas such as special laboratories, vaccine and emergency supply storage areas, medical records, and the like. In case of emergencies, such as fire, explosion, and the like, evacuees are not likely to take time to read evacuation signs in the chaos. Also, current wayfinding approaches do nothing to alert visitors to alternate routes to avoid particularly busy hallways. Finally, current approaches tend to be “one-way” in that they tend to direct visitors from an origin to a destination, but neither direct visitors back to the origin from the destination, nor direct a visitor to or from ancillary or off-route side-trips.
In summary, signage-based wayfinding is unable to provide active, continuous, and personalized information to a visitor. Moreover, the increasingly familiar use of GPS technology is ineffective for wayfinding because portions of facilities tend to block line-of-sight transmission between handheld GPS units and GPS satellites.